Fastest Deadly Top 10

Welcome to my Deadly Top 10...

..a chance to choose the top ten fiercest,

fastest, most tactical, toxic and well-armed animals on the planet.

All deadly in their own world and sometimes deadly to me.

Who do you think will be number one of my Deadly Top 10?

In this countdown, I'm choosing my Top 10 Fastest Predators.

Oh!

Rocket-powered, turbo-charged, Top Gear-style hunters

who use high velocity to catch up with their prey.

But it's not just about being the fastest runner,

there are some truly speedy surprises to watch out for

as we race for number one.

Don't blink, you might miss them.

The first animal in my Top 10 Fastest countdown

doesn't even have any legs.

Number ten, the black mamba,

the fastest snake in the world.

Is that a snake or a branch?

Oh, it's incredibly speedy. Look at that - lightning.

What an awesome creature.

The world's fastest snake

is a black mamba and, at first sight, it seems like a crazy name.

I mean, look at it, it's a kind of a dull olive-brown colour.

Why would you call it a black mamba? Until it gapes at you and you see

the inside of that mouth which is the most perfect black,

and that black tongue as well. What an incredibly evil-looking sight.

This is a very venomous snake,

so I've got to try and keep my distance from it. Look at that.

I mean, he's holding his entire body up

probably two or three feet off the ground.

The secret to their speed is rapid-fire serpentine motion.

They throw coils of their body quickly from side to side.

Each grips like the treads of a tyre.

It needs to be fast as it often lives and hunts out in the open.

Its speed is great for chasing down prey or for escaping predators.

At top whack, these guys can go at over 10 mph.

That's fast enough to keep me on my toes.

That's a good jogging pace,

incredible for an animal with no legs.

It is so quick, the movements are so unpredictable.

Fastest snake in the world, sounds pretty good to me.

In at number nine, it's a speedy hunter

I'm sure you will never guess.

Lightning fast and rather surprising.

These gruesome tentacles are, in fact, a nose

belonging to the star-nosed mole.

So how does a starry snout turn a mole into a racer?

He might look slow,

but equipped with such a slippery, slimy, sensational nose,

he can hoover up prey at record-breaking speed.

In fact, he's actually the fastest foraging animal in the world

and this is how he does it.

The nostrils are surrounded by 22 fleshy, fingery tentacles

which allow the mole to sense the world by touch

at an astonishing rate.

Unbelievably, it can touch 13 separate areas of the ground

and demolish four items of prey every second.

Each wriggling tentacle is covered in thousands of tiny nodules,

sensitive enough to detect one grain of salt in a bucket of sand.

The rapid-moving tentacles pass a three-dimensional picture

of the soil to the mole's brain,

allowing it to instantly see the walls of its tunnel like a map.

A sixth-sense scanning machine, whizzing, sucking and whirling.

Absolutely nothing can escape this greedy, high-speed snuffler.

Slimy worms and hairy bugs are located and guzzled up

in the blink of an eye.

Down here in the underworld of the northern USA, anything that wriggles

is victim to the mighty mole and its high-speed scanner of a snout.

Snapping in at eight

is a fantastically-fast tropical crustacean,

the sharp-shooting mantis shrimp.

Blink and you'd miss its supersonic strike.

I wonder if I can get this Bornean one to give us a demonstration.

Oh!

The mantis shrimp strikes and he's back in his hole.

Mantis shrimps use their front claws as weapons

to create a lightning strike which can smash or spear their prey.

Oh!

They're so fast!

So how fast is its strike?

Using an underwater force meter and a special high-speed camera,

I can reveal some pack a punch

equivalent to the acceleration and force of a bullet.

Mantis shrimps have excellent eyesight too, which they use

to locate targets and to take aim.

They need accuracy and speed as their prey is often armoured

and very difficult to crack.

Crab pincers can snip off an antenna or an eye,

but they're not able to withstand firepower of this magnitude.

A couple of hammer blows and the crab is stunned.

The mantis shrimp can then dine in the safety of its burrow.

Smart and speedy, it's a winning combination.

What a wacky race this is turning out to be!

A racing snake,

a super-speedy mole

and a shrimp as fast as a bullet. It's another surprise at seven.

I'm asking the kids to compete with the adults.

The speedy, jet-propelled dragonfly nymph

is pitted against the fast-flying dragonfly adult.

The dragonfly is a strange beast, two creatures in one,

spending its youth underwater as a nymph and its adult life in the sky.

So which stage is the fastest predator?

The baby dragonfly nymph spends its days zipping around the pond

at top speed, chasing its favourite prey, tadpoles.

No bigger than a jelly baby, but a fearsome-looking hunter,

it's equipped with a jet-propelled rear end which allows it

to get right up close to its victims.

But it's the high-speed hidden weapon hidden under its chin

which makes it deadly.

It's an express missile which can only be deployed

at point-blank range.

Now only millimetres away,

the nimble nymph uses hydraulic technology

to draw water into its jaw.

The pressure begins to build until it reaches bursting point.

The two clasps holding its jaws shut

give way and it fires out the bottom half of its face.

Its prey is history.

This speedy hunter

can wrap its jaws around anything and everything within range.

Gruesome but gobsmacking.

So how does that high-speed jaw

compare to the winged tyrant of the river bank?

After a miraculous transformation,

the nymph emerges as a natural beauty, but looks can be deceptive.

This is a voracious aerial assassin.

Dragonflies can fly at up to 36 mph in any direction,

forwards, backwards, sideways.

A stunt pilot of the insect world,

with the manoeuvrability of a helicopter

and the speed of a fighter plane.

Slowed down 400 times,

we can see how they move their two pairs of wings independently

to twist and turn, beating up to 30 times a second.

This allows them to do battle with their own kind

in territorial disputes.

But the main reason they need these aeronautical skills

is to snatch their nimble prey from the sky.

Their jaws act like shears,

slashing vertically and horizontally,

dicing the victim's flesh.

So, which generation do you think is fastest?

Nifty nymph or flying-ace adult?

Though the killer kids are super-cool, they all grow up

into the amazing fighter flies.

For their agile, razor-rapid flight,

the dragonfly adults pip them to the post,

but only just.

My next animal is a super striker,

number six, the tongue-tying chameleon.

The chameleon's most deadly skill

is all down to how it catches its insect prey,

with one of the fastest tongues in the whole animal kingdom.

The tongue can be longer than its body,

it has a sticky tip that can envelop an insect,

and it can fire out in one 125th of a second.

Oh!

Ahhh!

The chameleon's famous tongue

is one of the world's most perfect insect traps.

This high-velocity tongue is much more complex than yours or mine.

When a chameleon is ready to strike,

it pushes the tongue into launch position.

Muscles contract to propel the tongue forward

like a ballistic missile,

accelerating five times faster than an F-16 fighter jet.

A fraction of a second before impact,

the end of the tongue forms a suction cup,

ripping the insect from its perch.

Then it recoils back into the mouth

and steel-trap jaws and needle teeth finish the job.

All of these precise actions are coordinated and completed

in the blink of an eye.

Well, let's catch our breath.

We've had a speedster snake, a super-snuffling mole,

a sharp-shooting shrimp,

fighter-plane flies and a missile-tongued chameleon.

Can you guess who's competing next as we race towards number one?

Shooting into slot five it's the pit viper,

a snake with a ferociously-fast strike.

This is the wonderful eyelash pit viper.

Even if you're someone who absolutely hates snakes,

you have to admit that that is a really beautiful animal.

But they are also highly-adapted hunters.

It depends totally on the swiftness of its strike

to catch and kill its prey.

Typical food for the eyelash pit viper would be something like

a small mouse, perhaps a bat,

they'll even catch hummingbirds on the wing.

The core body temperature of a bird or a small mammal

is around about 38 degrees,

so what I've got here is a balloon filled with water

that's almost exactly that temperature.

I'm going to move it in close to the viper

and hopefully I'll get it to strike towards the balloon.

Here we've got our mini-cam set up and ready to record at high speed.

That means we should see the strike

slowed right down and be able to really appreciate

quite how awesome it is. Right, let's give it a go.

HE LAUGHS

That was amazing.

What do you reckon, Nick? You think you got it?

Yeah, definitely that time, mate.

Let's see.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible.

You saw the mouth open almost so that it was fully wide like that,

almost as if it was creating a stabbing kind of shape

rather than a downward strike,

and the fangs were almost used like daggers to pierce into the balloon.

That was amazing.

Pit vipers come in a range of colours,

but they all need hyper-fast reactions

to strike their nimble prey.

On an island in Japan, pit vipers only have one chance a year

to catch small migrating birds.

If they miss, they starve.

Each spring, the snakes climb up into the trees and wait.

These branches are ideal for an ambush.

The birds are only here for two weeks, so every snake

is desperate to catch its dinner.

Pit viper strikes may be lightning-fast,

but so are bird reactions.

But serpent firepower ultimately beats fast feathers.

They then swallow their meal whole.

Sharp-shooting, super-swallowing...

what a snake!

At four, it's fantastically-fast fin power

belonging to the tuna, a living torpedo.

Tuna are some of the most rapid fish in the sea.

They are underwater rockets when hunting sardines.

Almost all fish are cold-blooded,

but tuna fish can warm up their blood like us,

which means their muscles have extra power.

Combine this with superb streamlining and you have a fish

which can swim twice as fast as a human athlete can run.

At top whack, they swim at over 40 mph.

The cold-blooded sardines are completely overrun.

The big enemy of anything trying to travel fast in water is drag.

That is the force of the water holding you back

as you try and move forwards.

To get around that, you need to be streamlined.

In the air, that's called being aerodynamic,

in the water, hydrodynamic.

The tuna is just about the most perfect example

of a hydrodynamic fish.

I, on the other hand, am not that streamlined,

so theoretically, if I was to get in there and try and travel fast,

I should be hammered by drag.

So we already know that tuna can swim at 40 mph,

which is almost 40 knots.

Let's see how fast I can go.

OK, Captain, hit it.

You can see as we start to build up speed automatically,

the water is pushing back against me

and I'm really, really struggling to hold on.

-I'm actually already losing my trunks!

-HE LAUGHS

I don't think I tied them on quite strong enough.

We can go a bit faster.

No! I'm good!

What speed are we at, boys?

That's 4.7 knots, Steve.

Well, I've still got hold of the rope,

-but...

-HE SPLUTTERS

How fast now?

-What's that?

-6.8.

OK, 10 mph. Ah!

-I've lost my trunks!

-He's lost his trunks!

I hope you can't see my bottom.

OK, so we're now going about a tenth of the speed

that a tuna can go, full whack.

It's almost pulling my arms out of my sockets

and I'm absolutely knackered.

My trunks disappeared hours ago

and I really hope no-one is watching round here

because I'm going to get arrested.

I lost my trunks at around 4 knots.

A tuna snaps up dinner at 40 knots.

No contest.

Time for the final leg of the race.

We've had slitherers, snafflers, strikers and swimmers -

now it's time for an awesome record-breaker.

At number three, it's the fastest bird in the sky...

..the peregrine falcon,

an eagle-eyed champion who needs ultra-high speed to catch its prey.

It can spot a pigeon from several miles away

and closes the gap between them by flying at death-defying speeds

of up to 200 mph.

It hits its target with the accuracy of a bullet...

..and in order to show you exactly how they manage this,

I've got to take to the skies.

I've seen peregrines in action many hundreds of times over the years,

I've even been hunted by one myself, but this is the first time

I've actually got an opportunity to actually feel how it is

to be a peregrine falcon and find out what really makes them top gun.

I'll admit I'm a tiny bit nervous.

This is going to be scary.

Let's go head to head.

Here we go!

When people say the peregrine

is the fastest creature that's ever lived,

they're not talking about just in normal flight,

it's when it's doing what's called a stoop.

That's the dive that it takes on to catch its prey.

They'll bank up high,

often getting right up into the sun so their prey can't see them,

and then fold their wings

and bolt down like a torpedo towards the Earth

and that's when they get up to their most incredible speeds.

In order to do that and not pass out,

they have special baffles in their nostrils

which stop the wind putting pressure on their brain and on their lungs.

And it's during these dives

that they reach incredible speeds of up to 200 mph.

So how will I cope?

Ohhh!

Oh, my goodness!

Oh!

I think we pulled about 5g there in that upward pull,

and for the peregrine, that would be totally effortless,

that's part of its everyday life,

but for me, I can just feel my whole bodyweight

being pulled back into the plane and the force of gravity pulling on me.

That's crazy. Ohhh!

Oh, that really turns your stomach.

I often thought that if I was going to be one animal in the world,

it would be a bird of prey like a peregrine,

that has the ability to fly under these incredible forces,

but after feeling how this makes you feel, I'm not so sure any more.

Its stunning skydiving skills

makes the peregrine the fastest flying assassin.

Now, no speedy top ten would be complete without my next contender,

number two, the cheetah, the fastest runner on Earth.

Not me, the other one with all the spots.

I met a friendly captive cheetah in South Africa

and tried to persuade her to race me.

And we're off!

She doesn't seem to be taking this very seriously.

This cheetah is more of a playful pussycat,

not much sign of the ultimate speed machine here.

Where are you going?

This way.

She just doesn't seem bothered.

But out on the plains of Africa, it's a very different story,

especially for a mother with hungry young cubs to feed.

Luckily, they won't starve,

as she is a super-specialised speed hunter.

She has 0-60 acceleration

as good as a Porsche, a Mercedes or a Lamborghini,

but she can't run fast for very long,

so she has to stalk up as close as she can.

She has to get within 30 metres.

Her prey, gazelles, are incredibly fast too.

Three strides in, she's at 40 mph.

He special spine and massive legs

give her a giant stride of seven metres,

three times the stride of a human Olympic sprinter.

She achieves top speed, a record-breaking 71 mph.

But the turbo-charged cheetah has a massive problem.

She can only sprint for about 300 metres.

It's 30 seconds until she burns out.

Her body temperature rockets.

If she continues much longer, she could die.

All she has to do is trip the gazelle up

and her cubs won't starve.

They get their meal and Mum gets a rest.

After her sprint, she has to rest for half an hour.

She pays a high price for her speed.

So if the fastest land animal is number two

and we've had the peregrine at three,

can you guess who I've chosen as number one?

It's a high-velocity, high-impact surprise.

Time for the Top 10 Fastest countdown.

Twisting ten, it's the black mamba.

Nosy nine, the star-nosed mole is fine.

Expressive eight, the mantis shrimp's great.

Speedy seven, dragonfly heaven.

Super-shooting six, chameleon-tongue tricks.

Flashy five, the pit viper.

Fin-powered four, torpedo tuna.

Turbo-charged three, the peregrine falcon.

Terrific two, the cheetah.

So who has won the Top 10 race?

Any ideas?

A clue - it dives into the sea.

Number one is the gannet, the dive-attack king.

You might think they look like giant seagulls,

but you wait until you see their high-speed stunt.

They are big, beautiful, fast-flying birds...

..with two-metre wingspans. That's greater than I am tall.

They fly for hundreds of miles over the ocean looking for fish,

but it's their high-speed dive attack

that makes them so incredible.

They can plunge into the sea from heights of 30 metres -

that's three times the height of the Olympic high dive -

rocketing into the water at speeds of up to 70 mph.

Such high-speed impact risks a broken neck.

By pulling its wings right back with the beak straight down,

the gannet becomes a spear.

They even have air sacks built into their heads and chest

which they inflate as they dive.

Total impact protection.

So for its breakneck speed, precision diving

and incredible air-to-water transformation,

this living spear is my super-speedy, deadly-diving,

high-impact number one.

Don't forget to join me next time for more Deadly Top 10s.

Who is going to be deadly number one?

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